Keith Ablow | Boston Herald
When confronted with speculation suggesting Casey Anthony was looking to cash in on the hype surrounding the case of her deceased daughter Caylee, her attorney, Charles Greene, has said she is interested in no such thing. He told reporters earlier in the week that Casey was “not trying to sell her story,” adding that:
“Right now, Ms. Anthony is busy dealing with some very real losses, not only the loss of her child, but the loss of the rest of her family relationships, the loss of any opportunity to ever have a normal life,” Greene said Monday, following a hearing involving one of his client’s lawsuits.
“She’s not out there trying to sell anything,” said Greene, explaining Anthony is instead spending time “in reflection.”
This seems to contradict speculation I reported on earlier. On its own, that fact might be easy to dismiss.
But a different story regarding her interest level in commercializing the ordeal is told by Dr. Keith Ablow, a popular psychiatrist practicing in the northeastern US.
Ablow claims he was approached by third parties representing Anthony about working with her on a for-profit book. Ablow countered, offering instead to treat her in private for free. The unnamed third parties, who he says knew he was about to release his own book on the matter and thought he might like to work with Anthony on another, were amenable to treatment—but only provided a for-profit book deal was also included. Ablow says he declined, saying he was “not interested in a for-profit project disguised as help. I was not allowed an a la carte menu so I decided not to dine at the restaurant.”
Other reports say Anthony has been offered upwards of a half-a-million dollars to do an interview. No word on the outcome of the offer, although in any case a unilateral interview offer does not come off as badly for Anthony as having third-party representatives shopping around for for-profit book deals.
Ablow’s own book is called Inside the Mind of Casey Anthony: A Psychological Portrait. He’s not the only one to have written about the case, so it’s not immediately obvious why Ablow was chosen by Anthony’s representatives to approach with the idea of a book deal. At second glance, however, with 57 reviews on Amazon currently, Ablow’s book gets a downright underwhelming two-and-a-half (of five) stars. Reading through some of these negative reviews, a lot of the disappointment appears to stem from the fact that, while Ablow doesn’t quite give Anthony a pass, among the book’s most prominent premises is the notion that Casey’s mother Cindy was responsible in an intangible, quasi-Freudian sense for producing what many people believe is a sociopath. One reviewer sums it up like this:
Ablow engages in the longstanding, but scientifically unsubstantiated practice of crucifying parents, particularly mothers, when their children turn out to have severe mental disorders. This view is outdated, increasingly under assault by modern scientific research, and very harmful to propagate.
Is it possible that Ablow was chosen because he blamed Casey’s mother to the extent that he did, and in doing so gave her a pass?
We may never know.
More on these alleged book deals as information becomes available.
